Tom Gallon - The Cruise of the Make-Believes

You may look into many such gardens, and may see for yourselves how bravely they began – with what high hopes. Here, for example, is what was once intended to be a summer-house; and it has long since fallen into decay, and become a place where the shabby things that are not wanted even in a shabby house have been tossed from time to time, and left to ruin. You will see creepers that started well, and intended great things, and clung quite bravely to walls; until the London atmosphere and neglect and one thing and another put an end to them. And you may see rows and rows of pots, wherein nothing grows nor ever will grow, and wherein the very earth that fills them is of a consistency known nowhere else. Here and there, too, a bit of trellis-work had been put up and painted; in Arcadia gardens it is generally found to be an easy hanging place for cloths and doubtful-looking garments.

In the gardens of Arcadia Street was one exception. That exception was the house, behind the front window of which, the wistful face of a girl had looked out at Mr. Jordan Tant – that girl about whom he had heard so much from his friend Gilbert Byfield. The house itself, poor and shabby though it was, was neat and scrupulously clean; but the real triumph of it lay in the garden. Not, perhaps, in the artistic sense, but rather that it was a garden of surprises – a place where it was impossible to say what you might meet next, if you wandered carefully through its circumscribed length, and took it seriously.

Yet to anyone to whom the mere name of garden means so much, what a pitiful place! For there was nothing really garden-like about it; it was a place of rags and patches and pretences. The few pitiful plants that struggled out of the black-looking earth here and there seemed to do so not because they liked it, but because they had a desperate desire to show what they could do, even against adverse fate, when they were put to it. Half a dozen things that could not have been named even by the most careful student in botany stood in pots under the kitchen window; and in front of these, spread out on the earth itself, was an old and very ragged carpet – a trap to the unwary, because of the many holes it contained and the uneven surface it presented on the uneven ground.

With the idea of hiding the carpet as much as possible, and at the same time of giving an air of luxury to the place, an ancient staggering table on three legs had been placed in the centre of it; and on either side of this table a chair, long since set aside as being too deplorable even for use in that house. It was a very mockery of a table, and the chairs were in a dreadful conspiracy with it to let down any unwary mortal who should attempt to sit upon them in their old age, unless he treated them with due caution and respect.

Nor was this all; the garden held other treasures. Another ancient strip of carpet, as ragged as its fellow, had been hung against a wall to form a species of background to a crazy box that stood against that wall. Not that you would ever have called it a box; it had a dingy rug upon it, and that dingy rug made it, of course, a species of settle or ottoman – an easy lounging place on summer nights. You had to sit down carefully upon it, because it had a defective board, which gave way unexpectedly and might let you through; but with care that was a fault that might not be noticed. For the rest, the place contained a bulky old plaster flower-pot, with some seedy-looking moss growing in it, and with great cracks at the further side from the house.

The kindly darkness was hiding the tawdriness of the place when a little door at the end of the garden opened, and a little man came in. A man shabby like all the place; with an old frock-coat much too large for him hanging in scarecrow fashion from his thin shoulders, with trousers much too long for him lapping over carpet slippers frayed and worn, and with an old velvet smoking-cap, with three strands of frayed silk to represent a tassel, stuck on one side of his head. A melancholy-looking little man, with a certain fierce sullenness upon him, as though he quarrelled perpetually with the world at large. He slammed the gate, and advanced into that sorry garden; made as if to kick the unwieldy cracked flower-pot, but thought better of it; and went shambling towards the table set upon the ragged carpet.

The fact that he caught his foot in a hole in the carpet, and almost precipitated himself over the table, did not improve his temper. He glared savagely about him, and gave his head a fierce rub with his cap before seating himself gingerly on one of the chairs. Having done so, he pulled his frock-coat closer about him, and shivered in the warm and stifling air.

"It's a conspiracy – that's what it is!" exclaimed the little man. "It's an infernal conspiracy against me from first to last!"

The shadows were lengthening in the garden, and the little man was rather a pathetic figure as he sat there, solemnly shaking his head and muttering to himself. Someone who had come to the back door of the house, and looked out upon him, hesitated for a moment, and then stepped quickly out towards him. A young girl with a bright, eager, thin face; the girl who had looked through the window at Mr. Jordan Tant. She came quickly towards the man, and dropped her arm round his shoulders, and whispered to him.

"Father – you're home quite early," she said. "Will you have your coffee out here?"

He shook himself peevishly away from her embrace. "Coffee?" he exclaimed. "Who the devil wants coffee, Bessie? A man wants something stronger than coffee. Besides – what's the good of making a fuss about my being home as early as this? You don't suppose I should have come home but for a very good reason – do you?"

The girl winced a little, and drew away from him. "I thought perhaps for once you were glad to come home, father," she said timidly. "And you know I always like to think of us sitting out in the garden – under the stars – and drinking our coffee. The best people do that every night of their lives – after dinner."

"After dinner!" he reminded her, raising a finger, and shaking it at her. "That makes all the difference in the world; I dare say anyone might drink the stuff after a good dinner – just to oblige a friend. But what is anyone to do – in what condition of mind do you imagine a man to be – when his dinner has been a thing not of the stalled ox order – but of herbs? Besides – I'm upset – annoyed."

"I'm sorry, father," said the girl softly. She tiptoed into the house, and softly called to someone within; came out again, and sat down at the further side of the table, folding her hands upon it, and looking at the shabby figure of the man on the other side of it.

"What has gone wrong, dear?" she whispered; and at the question he suddenly turned upon her, and opened the very floodgates of his wrath and misery.

"Turned out – ejected – thrust to the door with gibes and laughter!" he exclaimed. "For how many years have I not, in a sense, been the very prop and stay of that place – its chief ornament – the one being who in an impoverished and sordid neighbourhood has shed upon it the light of what I may term real intellect. I ask you, Bessie – for how many years?"

"For more years than I can remember, father," whispered the girl, turning away her head.

"Exactly," he responded triumphantly. "It has been to me not a mere house of refreshment – but a club – a place in which, by virtue of long usage, I had a species of proprietary right. They'll find their mistake out, of course; they're bound to do that in time. The Arcadia Arms without me degenerates into a mere low public-house – a pot-house; I had succeeded in raising the place. I was a feature – almost an institution. And now a vulgar creature – without a coat, mark you, Bessie! – points to the door, and says that I'm not to be served again. Some talk of a score – of a paltry sum that should have been paid long since."